Burden of Silence

<p><em>The Burden of Silence</em> is the first monograph on Sabbateanism an early modern Ottoman-Jewish messianic movement tracing it from its beginnings during the seventeenth century up to the present day. Initiated by the Jewish rabbi Sabbatai Sevi the movement combined Jewish Islamic and Christian religious and social elements and became a transnational phenomenon spreading througout Afro-Euroasia. When Ottoman authorities forced Sevi to convert to Islam in 1666 his followers formed messianic crypto-Judeo-Islamic sects Donmes which played an important role in the modernization and secularization of Ottoman and Turkish society and by extension Middle Eastern society as a whole.<br />Using Ottoman Jewish and European sources Sisman examines the dissemination and evolution of Sabbeateanism in engagement with broader topics such as global histories messianism mysticism conversion crypto-identities modernity nationalism and memory. By using flexible and multiple identities to stymie external interference the crypto-Jewish Donmes were able to survive despite persecution from Ottoman authorities internalizing the Kabbalistic principle of a "burden of silence" according to which believers keep their secret on pain of spiritual and material punishment in order to sustain their overtly Muslim and covertly Jewish identities. Although Donmes have been increasingly abandoning their religious identities and embracing (and enhancing) secularism individualism and other modern ideas in the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey since the nineteenth century Sisman asserts that throughout this entire period religious and cultural Donmes continued to adopt the "burden of silence" in order to cope with the challenges of messianism modernity and memory.</p>